I live here in OMA and watched the story last night on the news. A clear case of having a bad "standard response" in place for an event that should have been dealt with in a simple, quick manner.

Reporters and the talking heads on the news repeatedly commented that no one was expressing alarm or behaving as if a "serious" breach of security had occurred. General references were made to airport police and other "security" staff saying that the terminal dump was just an SOP response to the situation. I almost choked on my dinner. If it's not a big deal, Why then for the love of god would they need to yank everyone off of the NW, DL, AA, MW and AA flights in that end of the terminal. How do you loose sight of someone who breached security in a terminal area that is about the size of a football field? Especially when that someone is likely a 75 yr old grandma wearing Husker memorabilia (perhaps her 72 national championship commemorative Bob Devaney button set off the detector!).

Or maybe we just want to demonstrate our street kred to all the TSA folks at LAX.